Latitia & The Raven by S.F.M. (musemouth) copyright 2001
There was once a raven. The raven had sleek black feathers and stank of his home on the rooftops - smoke, garbage, car exhaust. His eyes were quick and slick and colored like yellow pebbles. He lived above the city, all alone, a black streak, a solitary cry. Nobody thought much of him. He was sad. His feathers and his eyes glittered with a beauty like the jaws of a lion or the haunches of a dog, but nobody took time to see the raven for who he was. He was all alone, surviving on what food he could find.
What you may not realize is that the raven was actually a prince. A prince from thousands of years ago, a prince who had lived so long that all his dreams were actual memories. He had been cursed by a wizard for loving the wizard's brown-eyed daughter. The prince was now a raven, an ancient, dirty, smoke-scented raven, a beautiful raven, a raven who could not grow old. Only feel old. He forgot what it was like to walk on two feet and have a lithe, smooth body and cover himself in jewels and velvets and the hands of lovely women. He forgot that he had once ruled the world. Now he only knew that he was black as tarnish and flew, razor-quick, over the angry city.
He was lonely and forgetful and filthy, and he could not die.
Right beneath the rooftop home of the princely raven there lived a girl. The girl was young, and her body was short and tender all over, and her eyes were free from pain. She had turned sixteen two days ago. All her friends from school had come to watch movies and smoke pot in the broom closet when her parents weren't paying attention. Today the girl was wearing a gray sweater, a present from her party. It clung to her in folds like a cat's skin. The girl had blonde hair that touched her ears and a friendly face. Her eyes were the color of goldfish.
The girl was named Latitia. "Like nothing," she'd laugh. "I wasn't named after anything. Not a relative, not a person from a book. I have a nothing name." She liked to watch movies and pretend to be mature and walk in the park at twilight, when the sun was slipping and bleeding all over the grass and everyone looked like a creature from a fairy tale. Latitia had liked fairy tales, once; when she was young enough to get away with it. Now she didn't. But she did like birds.
One night the raven dreamed of his brown-eyed love, the girl who had caused him to be trapped on the rooftops, and his sorrow was so sudden and so great that he stopped thinking. He just wanted to die. A wind came up. The raven mindlessly flew into it, his black wings gliding, and then fell. A falling bird. Like a drowning fish. He landed on Latitia's windowsill, limp and without a will to live.
She opened her window and scooped him up. "Are you all right?" she asked, placing him softly on her bed, right below the Beatles poster. "Are you all right, my bird, my orphan?" And she stroked his dirty feathers with her long, cold hands.
The raven looked into her goldfish-colored eyes. He wanted to answer. He wanted to say, "No, I'm not all right. I loved a girl and her father turned me into a bird. All day and all night I stink and I fly and my mouth is a beak and my hands are claws. I want to die." But instead he gave a feeble cry. The cry of a bird.
Latitia smiled.
Because he was a raven and she was a poet, Latitia named the raven Poe. This was just as well. He couldn't remember his own name anyway; it had faded with the rest of his human life. So Poe was nursed back to health, reluctant and confused, hidden in the bedroom of a girl who imagined fairies when she was high and dressed in gray and pink. She stroked him and cleaned him and sang to him. She was obsessed with him, obsessed with the beautifully ugly bird, obsessed with her shiny black foundling. And Poe, the prince, began to change.
All winter. All spring. All summer. Latitia looked out the window at the ripe reds and vague yellows of fall. "It's funny, Poe," she mused. "It's funny how you don't change. Don't get bigger. Don't get older. Like you're a magical bird, Poe. Magical." And she smiled at the raven on the foot of her bed. "One day you'll have to leave."
Poe thought of the smoke-tinted rooftops and felt sad.
"You can stay, my bird, my love." Latitia sensed his sadness. "You can stay as long as you want. I want you near me. I'd miss you if you left." And she kissed his sleek, stinking head. "I love you."
The words were like a spell. A spell that melted fire and froze ice. A spell that crept underneath the door like silver, like water, and up the bed and into Poe's small, sorrowful heart. He was changing. He could feel it. His feathers weren't part of him; this beak, those wings, all foreign. He suddenly wanted to be on the rooftop. He flew to the glass and beat himself against it with a desperation he had never felt before.
Latitia spoke not a word. Just opened the window and watched as her raven flew away, a black streak, a lonely cry. That's the way these things go, she thought. You have them for a year. Then they leave. Suddenly. No explanation for it.
I don't mind, she thought to herself.
The next morning tears pressed against her eyelids no matter what she did. She kissed a boy, she smoked pot, she brushed her hair. Nothing eased her sadness. It felt as if she had been unhappy forever. Latitia walked home heavily; stones grew from her sneakers. "All my dreams become realities," she whispered, for no reason whatsoever. "And some of my realities become dreams."
She didn't notice the boy watching her. The boy in clothes that didn't quite fit his tall body, the boy with long hair and a face from another era and eyes that had the look of a friend of them. She didn't see him.
But Poe saw her.